Why I Love Being Called a Student
The literal meaning of the word student in Arabic is "seeker" or "the person who demands", and that is why I love being called a student.
I grew up in an Arabic-speaking country, and I used the word "student" thousands of times, but never thought about what it actually meant, I just used it as a term that refers to people that go to school. I remember that I made two conclusions once I realized the Arabic meaning of the word "student":
- It is a precise description of me
- It is a very inaccurate way of describing people who attend an educational institution.
Firstly, I have always gone to school to learn about new and exciting material and have always found the subjects interesting and engaging (with a few exceptions...of course). At college, I made sure to only attend courses that I find interesting and informative. I love learning. I love when I go deeper into topics I know (depth) and when I learn about new things (breadth).
Another reason why I love the "seeker" description is that it is independent of age. I once had a teacher who was perhaps around 55 years old, but was still a student (seeker), he had an insane depth of knowledge in his specialty of math and computer science, and a breadth of knowledge that basically impressed everyone he met. He was the polymath who was always -and unintentionally- the person everyone surrounded at a party or a gathering to hear the interesting stories and ideas that he had to tell. It was always a pleasure to be around him.
Once he told me: "People ask me 'how do you know so much?' And I think...'how can you not know so much?!' Every time I seek a piece of information, I learn so much on my way there." Or as Austin Kleon put it: "Don’t worry about doing research. Just search."
There is this idea that if you are not interested in something, it's probably because you don't know enough about it. Like...if you read 3 articles about bee hives or ant colonies, or a book about greenhouses, or a lecture about primates, you might grow a strong interest in these topics that were irrelevant and dull for you before, and if you like them enough, perhaps people would start surrounding you at parties once you start enthusiastically talking about ant colonies. I feel like my teacher just learned about things as they showed up in his life, and grew more and more interesting in the process of accumulating interesting knowledge over a life team. He is a student. He is a "seeker".
Secondly, I have thought of how few people I met that actually fit the description of the word student as in "seeker". I was trying to remember and count the students that I have met in my years at school that were actually seekers, and I think I could only identify one. Everyone was there because they had to.
Robert Pirsig describes a student in a gradeless system according to his experience as an English professor:
"[The student would ] no longer be a grade-motivated person. He’d be a knowledge-motivated person. He would need no external pushing to learn. His push would come from inside. He’d be a free man. He wouldn’t need a lot of discipline to shape him up. In fact, if the instructors were slacking on the job he would be likely to shape them up by asking rude questions. He’d be there to learn something, would be paying to learn something and they’d better come up with it."
I understand the difficulties associated with this and the question of how you measure competence and differentiate between students, but I think that Pirsig's suggestion of a gradeless system offers a nice thought experiment.
I recommend changing the Arabic term for a student from "seeker" to one that fits the term "pupil" more accurately until proven otherwise.
I don't love being called a student for being a part of an educational institution since that is not a necessary condition for "seeking" which is independent of age and enrollment in any institution, but for its reference to a state of mind and a philosophy of life that I subscribe to.
